Games to Train Children's Minds
Research presented at the British Science Festival by psychologist Tracy Alloway shows that brain training games can improve school grades a significant amount within weeks, according to NHS Choices. There are a huge range of online games available to buy and many free sites too. Playing these games can help your child learn basic skills in preparation for school and continue to improve those skills throughout their school life.
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Concentration
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Encourage concentration, focus and attention span. Encouraging your child to focus now will make both her school and home life a lot easier in the future. One example of a concentration test is the free online test from Brain Training Puzzles. The concentration test is a list of 50 colored words, mostly written in different colors than the word itself. For example, the word "black" might be written in the color yellow. The test is to say out loud the color of the text, rather than the word. With the slightest loss of concentration, mistakes start happening.
Memory
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Improve a child's memory with games that children can really enjoy without even realizing they are training their memory. Sharp Mind Games offers a free cooking and memory serving game for children called Forgetful Barman. The child reads a list of ingredients and has to memorize it, mix the correct ingredients together and hand the customer his required drink. Brain Training Puzzles also offers a very simple free memory game. The child simply reads a list of numbers and letters and then turns away from the screen and tries to reproduce the list from memory on paper.
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Problem Solving
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Train the brain to problem solve and really help future math work as well as day-to-day activities. Brain Training Puzzles offers a free page of math sums similar to school work for your child to work through as quickly as possible. If your child would prefer something a bit more fun, Sharp Mind Games offers a download for sale at around $15 called Maze Book. With many different mazes at three different levels, it is suitable for a wide age range and not only helps with problem solving but also hand-eye coordination.
Spelling
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Learning to spell is very important for children as this will help them throughout their entire life, from improved grades at school to filling out job applications in the future. Learning Games for Kids has a whole range of free, online spelling games for children to learn while having fun. These include games such as Spelling Block, where the player clicks on individual letters to make three letter words, as well as Hangman, Word Search and Crossword games.
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